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Kill Your Darlings is as much an examination of college life and that too-short time in young adulthood punctuated by thrilling discoveries relating to self, sex and art as the true story of a 1944 murder.

It also marks a turning point in Daniel Radcliffe’s career while presenting Dane DeHaan (The Place Beyond the Pines) as a talent on the rise.

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Radcliffe has matured as an actor and, with his portrayal of celebrated poet Allen Ginsberg, shows his evolution from Harry Potter’s boy wizard to grown-up performer, in a role complete with onscreen drug use and sex scenes involving both genders.

While Radcliffe is quite capable as the seeker and fledgling writer Ginsberg, including working a convincing American accent, all eyes are on DeHaan as the opportunistic sexual cipher Lucien Carr. Soon to be seen as Harry Osborn in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, followed by James Dean in Anton Corbijn’s Life, DeHaan is a compelling screen presence.

DeHaan brings tension to the story as Carr, whose murder of David Kammerer, an older man obsessed with him (played by a bearded Michael C. Hall of Dexter fame) forms the often-wobbly dramatic centre of Kill Your Darlings.

John Krokidas, in his feature film debut, directs the drama, which follows the birth of the Beat Generation writers at New York’s Columbia University just before the end of World War II.

Can audiences take another Beat-era film after Howl and On the Road? Kill Your Darlings is the best of the lot but is still occasionally frustrating, a stylish-looking story that often presents the players as self-congratulating caricatures, overly proud of their own cleverness.

We meet Ginsberg as a repressed and jittery New Jersey kid struggling with guilt over his desperation to get away from his mentally unstable mother, Naomi (Jennifer Jason Leigh). His relief when he’s accepted at Columbia to begin a new life is palpable.

Smooth-talking and showy, fellow student Carr captivates Ginsberg from their first meeting, when he jumps on a library table to recite a passage by university-banned author Henry Miller. While Ginsberg takes it in with shocked amusement, the scene also presages a future bit of authority baiting, evidence of new literary vision that soon becomes an obsession for the rising writers.

Carr is a sly and manipulative sort who revels in eliciting reactions from others. He’s only too happy to take Ginsberg under his wing, introducing him to Yeats, new ways of thinking and expression, sex, booze, drugs and jazz in smoky Manhattan clubs.

Whatever is simmering between them — and Ginsberg is clearly deep in the throes of a serious crush on Carr — it enrages Kammerer, who has put his life on hold to find ways to be close to the increasingly disinterested Carr.

Off-campus encounters add more minds to a fledgling writers’ club. William Burroughs (twitchily played by Ben Foster), who we meet lounging in a dry bathtub with a gas mask strapped on his face, the better to expand his mind with nitrous oxide, helps further Ginsberg’s illegal substance education. Jack Kerouac (Jack Huston) a failed ex-football player, has more of a role in the mysterious events surrounding Kammerer’s murder.

The emotional heart of Kill Your Darlings, the title referring to William Faulkner’s assertion writers need to expunge the things they love best to grow artistically, rests in the relationship between Carr and Ginsberg. And as for the women in the cast, they are all but absent in this male-dominated story. Elizabeth Olsen has a blink-and-you-miss-her appearance as Kerouac’s girlfriend Edie Parker.

Shot on a shoestring budget over just 24 days, Kill Your Darlings often feels weighed down by a need to be clever. Praise to Krokidas, aided by Reed Morano’s cinematography, for his recreation of 1940s Manhattan, set to pounding jazz-band tom-toms and the clatter of typewriter keys. But he should have taken a page from Faulkner and done a little darling killing of his own.

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